this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025

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I just erased my project (jlai.lu)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

As the title says. I put the wrong value inside a clean up code and I wiped everything. I did not push any important work. I just want to cry but at least I can offer it to you.

Do not hesitate to push even if your project is in a broken state.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

I wanted to publish a tiny utility I created to GitHub (you know, it might be useful to someone else...). Before that, I wanted to some cleanup, rebasing/squashing a bit, etc. In the middle of that:

$ git checkout featurebranch
The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
.gitignore
.idea/…
etc...

Oh, sure, no problem…

$ rm -rf * .*
$ git checkout featurebranch
fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

D’oh! (Never mind, it probably wouldn't have been useful to anyone else, anyway.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Some wisdom my dad shared with me decades ago: when you’ve lost everything and must rebuild, the rebuild is ALWAYS better. As a programmer for a very long time who has done what you did, I have found this to be true. So there is your silver lining.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

i deleted all my nginx configs today its gonna be ok

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

i sudo shutdown now the main production (remote) server a few times before, and ive been doing sshing into servers for a long time.

there there 🫂 its ok. we all do this shit. you do have backups of course, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You’ve done it a few times? At the same job? Are you self-employed?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

throughout a few years.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

you do have backups of course, right?

cries

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I did a "rm -rf *" in the wrong directory today.

I got the absolutely beautiful "argument list too long" in return.

I had a backup. But holy shit I'm glad the directory had thousands of files in it and nothing happened. First time I got that bash error and was happy.

I usually have rm aliased to "trash" or whatever that cli based recycle bin is. But just installed a new OS and ran this on a NAS folder today by mistake.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

My dad once rm -rf’ed his company’s payroll server by accident. He was a database admin at the time. He was asked to make a quick update to something. Instead of running it as a transaction (which would have been reversible) he went “eh it’s a simple update.” He hit Enter after typing out the change for the one entry, and saw “26478 entries updated”. At that point, his stomach fell out of his asshole.

The company was too cheap to commit to regular 3-2-1 backups, so the most recent backup he had was a manual quarterly backup from three months ago. Luckily, Payroll still had paper timesheets for the past month, so they were able to stick an intern on data entry and get people paid. So they just had a void for those two months in between the backup and the paper timesheets.

It wasn’t a huge issue, except for the fact that one of their employees was on parole. The parole officer asked the company to prove that the employee was working when he said he was. The officer wanted records for, you guessed it, the past three months. At that point, the company had to publicly admit to the fuckup. My dad was asked to resign… But at least the company started funding regular 3-2-1 backups (right before his two week notice was up.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Time to implement a couple forms of backups.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 days ago (4 children)

IN CASE OF FIRE

1. git commit
2. git push
3. exit building

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Except when everyone pushes to main at the same time and now you have conflicts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

They wouldn't push to main at the same time tho, they would push to the branches they're working on. Unless their organization is very badly run, and then it's probably already happened before just because it was Tuesday.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Who pushes to main? That branch should be protected! Who reviews the merge request?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Lol, standards 🙄

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

git-fire

"git-fire is a Git plugin that helps in the event of an emergency by switching to the repository's root directory, adding all current files, committing, and pushing commits and all stashes to a new branch (to prevent merge conflicts)."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

git commit -m 'asdf'

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have this printed on a sign at work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

It was on a sign where I once worked, but that was almost 10 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You guys don't use a COW (copy on write) filesystem?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Version control would be quite adequate if using a sane amount of time between pushes

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Except that one is automatically versioned and would have saved you this pain, and the other relies on you actively remembering to reflexively commit, and then do extra work to clean up your history before sharing, and once you push, it's harder to change history and make a clean version to share.

These days, there's little excuse to not use COW with automated snapshots in addition to your normal, manual, VCS activities.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I'm paranoid. I have like 5 different ways (including 3-2-1 backups) to restore everything. COW fs is great for stuff that is not a git-able project.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What did you learn from this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

To push daily and to not write test :P

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Sounds like you need Jujutsu 🥰

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Sorry this happened.

Use it as an opportunity to learn how to better store and edit your code (e.g. a VCS and a smart-ish editor). For me, a simple Ctrl-Z would be enough to get my code back.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

it sounds like they rm -rf-ed their project. How would Ctrl+Z help here?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I should have put it inside the post text but I used a wrong value inside a test

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

If you're using vscode you might be able to look through the individual file histories to recover some work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

On the bright side, you've now got squeaky clean disk space to fill with new projects!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I keep my git clone in Dropbox so I can revert accidental delete and always have the most recent code on all devices without having to remember to commit and push. If it requires manual execution I wouldn't really consider it a proper backup solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I use Dropbox too. Though I have to admit, when running code you sometimes have to pause sync otherwise it interferes with code execution. But definitely worth the peace of mind. Sometimes you don't want to commit stuff until you're sure that it works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I have been burnt by Dropbox in the past so now use Syncthing between my desktop, laptop, and a private remote server with file versioning turned on. Trivial to global ignore node_modules, and not giving data to a third party.

It's saved me on several occasions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I have a separate usb harddrive for just this occasion. My lazy ass just likes to play "We backed it up last time, do we need to do it every time?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 days ago

No backup, no mercy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh man, I hate losing code. Last time it happened I spent more time trying to recover it than it would've taken to rewrite it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You can't just... replace your baby, man!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

On the contrary! I found out that a rewrite from scratch leads to much better code and abstractions, as you understand the problem space better. (On the other hand, beware of http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/second-system-effect.html)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

Sympathy upvote

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Do you at least have some local commits to get back to? Or did your job remove the .git folder as well? 👀

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

also removed .git

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

what garbage cleanup tool gets rid of dotfiles, especially .git? if you let us know we can learn to avoid it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

shutil.remove_tree(BASE_DIR) instead of shutil.remove_tree(TEMP_DIR) inside of tear down code

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

oh, I see. well, lessons learned hopefully! :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

On top of that, the content of .git/objects/ is write protected, so even if you go rm -r, you'll get an additional warning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

You have backups? Right?

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